


Rules to Live By

by CopperCaravan



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fera Shepard, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:56:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4537014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ensemble: 3 key moments between Shep and Garrus over the course of the trilogy, which can be read as romantic or platonic. Shepard has her rules, but there are always loopholes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rules to Live By

**1\. You fuck with Shepard’s people, you end up dead.**          

            If she’s being completely honest with herself—which she’s learned is only a good idea three times out of ten and then once more—she hadn’t wanted to bring him along.

            In another situation, she might’ve been impressed. Vakarian was a good shot, a tactical thinker, and it _had_ , after all, worked out in the end. There was a certain degree of admiration reserved for people who could turn a battlefield of any kind to their advantage and he had _technically_ done that.

            But there are certain things Shepard doesn’t tolerate. One of those things is people who endanger innocents by, just for example, taking a shot at a guy with a hostage, perhaps in a small-time med clinic in the Wards.

            The other thing she doesn’t tolerate— _ever_ —is people who endanger her team. You fuck with her people, you end up dead. And Garrus Vakarian had used her team as a distraction-casualties-likely. But now she supposes she’ll have to change the rule: you fuck with her people, you _usually_ end up dead. And if you don’t end up dead, you apparently end up serving on her ground crew next to the people you fucked with. She isn’t happy about the alteration— _Have to change all my business cards now,_ she thinks. _Should’ve at least punched him for that._

            “He could have shot the hostage!” she’d yelled. She had been furious with him. “They could have taken the three of us out execution-style and what could you have done with a sniper rifle from cover in the one and half seconds it takes eight men to fire bullets into my people?”

            “I—I didn’t mean to—” He’d stuttered, although she’d not been able to read his expression, and then he’d turned to the doctor immediately to ask if she was alright. That was something, at least. And she knew he hadn’t _meant to_. She could tell already that he wasn’t a _bad_ guy. But he hadn’t _meant_ to do anything else either. He hadn’t thought it through past the end of his scope and the single shot he could take. His intentions might have been fine, but they didn’t matter if his actions couldn’t meet them. She was surprised to find that she had expected more from the C-Sec officer; she didn’t usually expect anything from Sec except for puffed up chests and badge flashing. So why she’d expected more from him in particular was a mystery to her, one that she’d quickly dismissed because who had time for introspection when chasing down a cartel ring-leader?

             But Vakarian had made his case and, despite knowing Kaidan and Ashley didn’t want him along and despite even that she wanted to throw a right hook at his face hard enough to knock him on his bony Turian ass, she just held out her hand for a shake and said “Alright, Vakarian, you’re in. Welcome aboard.”

            But now that he’s here, she wonders what in the hell she’s going to do with him since she’s _apparently_ not going to shoot him. _Always a damn loophole,_ she thinks.

**2\. This is our team. Watch each other’s backs.**

            Garrus is constantly teetering on the edge of _protect Omega_ and _fuck it, blow Omega up._

            The problem, he tells himself, the problem is that these people have come to depend on him. His team, their families, civilians and shopkeepers and bartenders and taxi drivers and every damn body else on this rock—they’re all counting on _that vigilante, that turian fellow, Archangel._

            He can’t bring himself to tell them all that he’s just Garrus Vakarian, just some C-Sec fuck up who lost his shit when his friend got spaced, ran away from his family and his job and his duty. He can’t tell them that he can’t save them, can’t cleanse Omega of all the corruption, can’t fix everything he’s broken by killing killers and forcing red sand dealers to overdose and feeding dog fighters to their mutts.

            Shepard would be disgusted if she were here. This is not who she taught him to be. This is not what she would have wanted for him.

            Garrus should have been there. Shepard had saved her team—almost every damn one of them. With the Normandy blown to pieces around her, she’d gotten all but twenty to the escape pods. Saved Joker. Made sure Liara got out. But he hadn’t been there to save her. “This is our team,” she’d said to them all in the first debrief after Therum. “Watch each other’s backs. Take care of each other. Depend on each other.” And, to his surprise, she’d had his back. And he’d had hers. But, in the end, he hadn’t been there when she needed him most.

            He’d heard the news reports shortly after and hadn’t believed them, of course. No way Shepard was down, no way she hadn’t made it. “A couple of days,” he’d told the bartender. “A couple of days and she’ll show up with a black eye and a grin.”

            Joker found him, when they let the poor guy out of the hospital. Told him about those last few minutes, about the ship and the fire and the... end. About Shepard, about the black sucking her away and the pod shooting him off to wait in the middle of nowhere all alone, without her. “Just you wait, Joker,” he’d said, shaking his head. “A couple of weeks, she’ll turn up.”

            The asari from C-Sec’s psych department made him listen to the recordings of the comms, what little had been salvaged anyway. He heard Shepard send Liara to the pods, heard the crew scrambling to escape, heard Shepard convince Joker to abandon ship. He heard Joker screaming her name and heard her breath get quick and shallow, heard her voice between panicked breaths, “oh god, oh god, no, no, come on, just... stay calm, Shep, you’re—shit, no, no, I don’t—” But Garrus had tried to tell her, this asari, this psych eval specialist, he tried to tell her about Shepard. “No,” he’d said, slamming his hands on the table. “No, no, no! I know Shepard. I _know_ her. A couple more months, you wait and see. A couple more months and she’ll come back, bruised and probably missing a tooth, but she’ll be fine. I know her!” But the asari hadn’t listened.

            No one on Omega had listened to him either.

            And Shepard isn’t here. No, she’s floating debris, falling forever over the skies of Alchera. And what she wanted for him—what _he_ wanted—none of it matters now. Who he was and who he might’ve been... Part of Garrus Vakarian—hell, maybe all of him—is floating in the black right beside all the pieces of her. That’s where he should be: with her, making up for what he’d missed. The only man _here_ , the one staring down a scope at a bridge full of mercs, is Archangel.

            And he doesn’t have a team left to look out for.

            Perhaps it’s a trick, perhaps the stims are finally catching up to him, perhaps he’s been shot already and he’s hallucinating, but it looks like, down there, fighting their way across the bridge—despite everything, it looks like there’s a team looking out for him. _This is what Shepard would call a loophole,_ he thinks. And, from delirium or relief, he laughs a little.

**3\. Stay alive.**

           "Come back alive," she'd tell them all. Every single time they went out—didn't matter if they were going to kill a thresher maw or buy rations on the Citadel. She worried more than she wanted them to think, but of course they all knew. How could they not? Always, she'd tell them, "Come back alive." _  
_

            And in London, he'd said it to her.

            London. It had looked an awful lot like Palaven: rubble and death and reapers. He couldn’t imagine the city that must have stood before the end came. But he stole that moment—the war couldn’t take everything from him—and gave it to her. _Come back alive. Come back to your team. Come back to your people. Come back to me._

            But the trouble is that Shepard has her rules. “Rules to live by,” she’d called them once.

            A month ago, he’d found her in the comm room, standing over a screen staring at figures and projections and reports. He was having a hard day. He sighed. She looked up at him. “Shepard.” She walked over to him, left her figures and projections and reports for another time. “I... I just—” She put her hand on his face, fingers soothing scars long healed. “I don’t know how we can win this, Shepard. I don’t know how we can keep fighting.” And she’d smiled—a rare sight by then—and said “I do. The Reapers fucked with my people, Garrus. You know what happens when someone fucks with my team.” Yes. Yes, yes he did know.

            A week ago, when they’d turned and headed to Earth, she’d corralled them all into the mess hall— _fuck the comm room,_ she’d told him. _I’m sick of that place_ —and gave them a good, old fashioned, “Shepard’s Pep Talk.” She told them they were strong, that they were good, that they were hers. She told them they could win. She told them it had been an honor. She told them she wouldn’t trade a damn one of them for anything in the galaxy. She told them “This is our team. Watch each other’s backs.” And she knew they would—they always had.

            But the citadel, the crucible—it had fired. And they keep telling him that she’s gone. _Gone,_ they say. Not dead, even though that’s what they mean, what they want him to understand.

             _You have to come back alive, Shepard. It's one of your rules. You have to._

            He can almost hear her, the smug laugh in her voice. _Can’t live by the rules if I’m not alive, Vakarian. I told you: there’s always a loop hole._

_Yeah,_ he tells her. _Yeah. There damn well had better be this time._


End file.
